Imagine we have two makers of some piece of technology, who are in stiff competition. Some other company waltzes in and offers both companies a fat wad of cash, if they're willing to compromise their products in some way. One company says "sure," and takes the cash. The other company doesn't.
The company who bends over takes a small portion of their kickback, and uses it to depress the price on their unit. Since they've already made a lot of money, before they even sell a single board, they can afford to price their model a bit lower than the competition's.
The public, which is made up mostly of idiots who don't look beyond the price tag, only notice that one company's is cheaper than the other, and flock to it.
End result: more compromised units end up being sold; that hardware design becomes standard; the company who tried to produce good hardware and sell it goes out of business.
No I think the point in the story was that the constant heat both from the sun striking the dark-colored road surface, and from the friction of the cars driving over it (the wheel/road contact surface is hardly frictionless, although it doesn't slip a whole lot), created heat, which warmed the air through the pipes.
The story has a bit of an urban legend quality to it, but the principles seem sound.
I was curious exactly what you'd have to do to get 1,000 Gs, so here are some back-of-the-envelope numbers for comparison:
It wouldn't survive being fired out of a handgun (zero to 800fps along a 5" barrel [1] implies an acceleration, assuming I did my math right, of ~468000 m/s^2 or about ~47,000 Gs).
Still, it's better than your brain inside your head, which can only take about 150-200 Gs before you start doing serious/irreparable damage [2] (the rest of your body is a lot lower, like 8-20 Gs depending on direction and body part, but your head alone can take a bit more since it doesn't have all those squishy bits).
I was curious how fast you'd need to be going in a typical car accident to get 1,000Gs: The fatal accident that killed Princess Di was supposedly somewhere around 70-100 G [3]; if we assume that was the result of crashing at 120 MPH or so, 190 km/h [4], we can extrapolate that to get 1,000G, you'd need to have a speed of around 1682 MPH. [5] (That doesn't say anything really about surviving a car crash at that speed, because obviously there are mechanical and thermal problems involved...)
So if you swallowed one of those things, I think it's pretty clear that you'd be mush long before it got bothered.
[1] Pulling these numbers out of my ass, but they're roughly typical for a 1911. [2] http://hypertextbook.com/physics/mechanics/acceler ation/ referencing medical literature from helmeted motorcycle crashes [3] ibid. [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diana,_Princ ess_of_Wales [5] You use the acceleration value and speed to calculate a "time" for the collision, around 0.07s, and then use that to get the velocity for an acceleration of 1000G. I never said it was that reliable a figure...
That's one way of doing it. However, I suspect that the cheapest way is probably to just keep the oil constrained to the racks, and use chilled water throughout the building. There's a lot of existing experience and infrastructure related to chilled water.
Depending on the temperature you need to get it down to, it might be acceptable to just use passive cooling (cooling/evaporative towers, radiators) and not actual refrigerative (state-change, with compressors and the rest) systems. Certainly if you built your datacenter in a northern climate, you'd probably be fine most of the year by just pumping the water/coolant through some radiators on the roof and back down.
And you could do the same thermosiphoning stuff with water as you can with oil, but with a lot less oil. Sure, you have an extra heat-exchange step, but you don't have to worry about using oil-proof fittings throughout the building -- regular plumbing would suffice.
Slightly offtopic: I had always assumed that MEK was increasingly hard to get because they had discovered it caused cancer or something, but Wikipedia indicates that it's actually a drug precursor? Bizarre. Anyway, you used to be able to get the stuff in most hardware stores, and it's just about the best degreaser that you'll ever use. You can put a greasy part in MEK, swish it around a little, and pull it out... just dry it off, and it's clean. Really great for taking cutting oil off of parts after machining.
Not sure when exactly it happened, but all of a sudden it became really hard to just go out and buy anymore. Seems to me it was about 10 years ago. But if Wikipedia is to be believed, it still gets used as a solvent in a lot of paints and stuff.
It's not a step forward. It's a step back in a sense. This has been how large transformers have been build for decades. I'm sure that this application will use the same oil as street transformers, and I've seen a number of hobby applications of this in machine cooling before.
More than that, back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for supercomputers (I think several of the Cray models specifically) to have their processor cores submerged in liquid coolant. [1]
It wasn't oil, though. IIRC, it was a hideously expensive, probably ozone-depleting, known-to-the-state-of-California-to-make-your-nuts -shrivel, processed from baby seals, 3M product called "Fluorinert."
For a few years back in the IBM G5 / Intel P4 days, I was sure we were headed back in that direction. I mean, my computer has a freaking radiator in it, a submersion bath can't be that far away, right? But then the chip manufacturers woke up to the whole power-consumption thing and we got a reprieve.
I don't know what the boiling point of Fluorinert is, but I've always thought that the best cooling liquid would be some sort of lightly-pressurized gas, such that it was a liquid except for right over the surface of the chips, where it would boil. The state-change would pull away tons of heat, and then you could re-condense it against the top of the container (chill it either just to the atmosphere or with conventional refrigeration systems). Don't think I've ever seen this implemented, though.
[1] Wikipedia confirms and says it was the Cray II specifically. Photo here; the Fluorinert was cooled via a "waterfall," which is damn cool in itself.
You say that like it matters. If the music industry could get some sort of strict liability pushed into law, the courts would just treat that unsecured wireless router like they treat a loaded handgun left sitting around. They'd just say that your failure to secure it was so grossly negligent that you're automatically responsible for any misuse that occurred as a result.
Sure, it would mean fining a lot lot of grandmothers (and children, and dead people, and children of dead people, etc.) into bankruptcy, but do you really think that's not acceptable to the RIAA, if they feel that their cash cow is in jeopardy?
I don't think the RIAA is ever going to go quietly. It's not just going to wink out of existence some day. It, by which I mean the people who make it up, have too much invested already to not go down without a fight. Which means they're going to call in every favor from every two-bit politician and lobbyist that they have, and get things passed (tack on to this must-pass bill here, another voice-vote there...what the people don't know, they can't blame anyone for later, right?) without any regard for the consequences.
And last I checked, nobody, not even Congress has any love for the RIAA. They get complaints by the hundreds or thousands I bet - each and every single Congress Member - about the RIAA.
All of which are helpfully read by some unpaid staffer and promptly placed in the "circular file."
Meanwhile, those members of Congress do seem to be listening to the entertainment companies that sign the donation checks -- or did you forget about all the Senators and Representatives who signed on to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?
When push comes to shove, unless it's immediately preceding an election and it's an issue that's being widely covered by the media, cash talks and bullshit -- which includes pretty much anything not written on check paper -- walks. Politicians only care about two things: how they'll get re-elected, and how they'll get paid. And it's going to take a lot more publicity than we have right now to turn digital media into an issue that drives votes, like abortion, gun control, or taxes.
Want some names? Dianne Feinstein, for starters, is practically the film and recording industry's representative to the Senate. [1] She's personally cosponsored more pro-industry, anti-consumer legislation than anyone else that I can think of, and she gets re-elected, year after year. Orrin Hatch is another one, on the other side of the aisle. Ditto for Ted Stevens -- the man's a borderline retard, but he brings home the bacon to Alaska, and that's all voters there care about.
Until you can get enough interest to knock some of the politicians who are obviously in the pocket of the industry out of office, nothing's really changed. They'll appear to clean up their act for a while when they know their offices are on the line (in theory), but once back off the hook they'll just go back to screwing the public like they always do.
The benefit of all these cracks isn't to allow people to copy the movies. That ability was never in doubt -- people will always be able to do that. They'll be able to do that regardless of what the content monopolies do, short of just deciding that they won't release movies anymore (which is fine; there's enough of a demand for entertainment that other people will do it -- there's nothing special about making movies that a lot of people can't do, it just takes a lot of money).
Holding onto a crack until AACS is ubiquitous wouldn't do anything. The ultimate failure of AACS isn't, and never was, in doubt -- all DRM is flawed, and it will eventually be broken.
The question is whether it's possible to convince both the studios/content-creators, and consumers, of the utter futility of DRM in the first place, so they'll stop trying to do it, and stop wasting everyone's time. DRM is nothing but a broken window: it's millions of man-hours and probably billions of dollars of resources diverted from other, more productive, tasks, both to create it and break it. That's the real cost of DRM.
So if by releasing cracks for AACS every time they update it, as quickly as possible, it demonstrates to the studios that they're engaging in a war against a guerrilla enemy that they can't possibly defeat, regardless of how much money they spend, perhaps they'll throw in the towel sooner rather than later. It may be a slim chance, but given that Apple has started to see the light, there's some hope.
That's the real benefit of these cracks. Compared to the economic and social cost of the wasted effort, the ability of people to pirate a few movies pales in comparison.
Long answer: Although the Supreme Court has at times broadened the definition of an individual ("man") as used in the Constitution to include foreigners, traditionally the rights of foreign citizens while in the U.S. (or the rights of U.S. citizens abroad) is defined by relationships agreed to between the nations themselves, via treaties. Most nations agree to essentially afford the same rights to foreign visitors as they do to their own citizens, in exchange for the same protection for theirs. This sort of quid pro quo, written or unwritten, dates back hundreds if not thousands of years.
If you read the text inside the front cover of a U.S. Passport [1], that's what it's all about; a Passport is essentially a request to a foreign nation, to extend -- voluntarily -- certain rights and privileges to the bearer (who, the Passport signifies, is a citizen in basically good standing of the U.S.). I'm not sure if they do it anymore, but it used to be pretty standard to confiscate the Passport of a felon. [2]
The idea that the same Constitutional rights held by U.S. citizens apply to everyone, worldwide, including non-citizens, is a fairly modern construction. (And to be honest I'm not really sure if it holds water, since the Constitution is basically an agreement between the government and the governed, and I think it's dangerous to apply it to other nations' citizens; but that's a whole different issue.)
In times past, traveling without a Passport or similar diplomatic papers, or traveling to a country that didn't have a treaty with your own, was a dangerous business. (And in fact it still is; wander around in the wrong part of the world without a Passport and you'll find yourself detained at the very least.)
[1] "The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection." [2] Neat page on the origins of modern Passports here ( http://www.passport.gov.uk/general_history_early.a sp ); basically they originated as requests from one sovereign to another, asking that the bearer be given safe conduct through their territory. In fact English ones were actually signed by the King or Queen, up until the mid 1600s.
Barbados recently won the second (appeal) round of its WTO case against the US for laws prohibiting on-line gambling. This gives Barbados the LEGAL right to take retaliatory measures. Maybe Internet Radio and Pirate Bay can both find a new home?
Are you sure it was Barbados? I thought it was Antigua. It wouldn't surprise me if there was more than one country going after the online gambling thing, though...
You mean western, modern nations are not run by the mafia? "The mafia is a kind of organized crime being active not only in several illegal fields, but also tending to exercise sovereignty functions - normally belonging to public authorities - over a specific territory..." Seems to me the key difference is whether the people running things are in public view or not - and even in western, modern nations the people running things are rarely those in public view.
Well, the major difference is that in the U.S., and in many other countries, the "mafia" have achieved enough power to effectively legitimatize their business models, and in some cases even protect them from competition, with the weight of law.
Why work against the government, when for a few million bucks, you can make it work for you?
And it would be difficult and expensive enough that the manufacturers would still subject their products to thorough testing. And probably expensive enough that it'll only be used in high-confidence operations, such as NASA hardware.
That was my thought, too. I could definitely see this being used in satellites or other applications where getting the hardware back is impossible or very expensive, but I can't see it being used on a microwave or DVD player.
It's my understanding that a lot of NASA's stuff has long been designed with a high degree of flexibility in the hardware, so that as much stuff as possible can be patched and fixed in software. (A while back there was a story about Voyager and how the NASA guys had done some software patching to make it last longer by reducing power consumption.) Actually, I'd be very surprised if some NASA engineer somewhere hasn't considered using FPGAs already, in order to get the additional flexibility and fault-tolerance that being able to re-jigger your hardware from millions of miles away would bring.
I had never heard of Digital Proofreaders before; that's very cool. Their system seems to be very close to what I was envisioning (allows distributed proofreading via a web interface, automatically assembles books together and puts them in a central repository for access).
Thanks for the link. The next time I'm talking to any of my librarian friends, I'll have to mention it. I didn't see anything on their FAQ though about accepting books from libraries for digitization, just on starting a project yourself (meaning scan the book and submit the scans and OCRed files for proofreading). But the scanning is really the easy part relative to the proofreading, so it still is a big step forward.
While I agree that students should have rights, I have to ask: why shouldn't they be second-class citizens? They're not working and they're not nearly as capable as adults of making good decisions. I think "second-class citizen" is a rather good description of what they should be, as opposed to the "first-class citizens" who work and pay taxes for the upkeep of the city. The question, though, is about how many or how few rights second-class citizens should have.
I think the problem is that the U.S. legal system lacks the framework for dealing with anything besides two types of things: individuals, and property. Either you're an individual, and have rights, or you're property, and belong to somebody else.
There have always been questions as to the status of certain things: slaves, for example, were traditionally property, but later became individuals; animals, who arguably have certain independent characteristics, are still just property; and the current abortion debate is mostly an argument as to whether a fetus is an individual, or merely a woman's property.
The track record of the legal system at dealing with the grey areas isn't too great (cf. "3/5ths compromise," or the now-ridiculous limits on exactly how hard you can beat your wife). The solution here seems to be to clarify the status of minors as one or the other.
Yeah that's similar to what I was thinking about. Actually, what I was recalling was this thing, which seems to pretty clearly use off-the-shelf DSLR cameras (not sure on the lenses though, they're not visible). It probably costs a fortune because of the robotics and vacuum system necessary for the automatic page turning, but I think you could DIY something similar out of two copy stands for a lot less if you were okay with flipping pages.
The one you linked to seems like it would have more distortion of the pages because the cameras aren't being held constantly perpendicular to the page, but maybe it just corrects for that in software afterwards. (It wouldn't be hard, in fact I think all the code you'd need to do it is part of the Panorama Tools / Hugin package.)
What I think is a bigger problem for most libraries isn't the scanning per se, because that at least is a problem that most non-technical people can understand, but it's the storage and document-management that's the issue. Once you have the book scanned, you have a giant pile of JPEGs or TIFF files...unless you're careful about organization, it could become a real mess in a hurry.
So where I think the missing piece is, has to do with getting from raw images to an actual ebook. The hardest problem seems to be in the proofreading step; if you run each image through an OCR program, and then you want to proofread it, you need some way of distributing pages out to proofreaders, and letting each of them have a page of text and the image from that page, side by side. And then managing their edits and checking changes back in, etc. It's nothing really novel -- they're all solved problems in other areas (documents management, change management, remote access, web services) -- but I've never seen them combined.
If you had a software package that handled all the document management and proofreading (preferably something that your proofreaders could log into remotely and work, while storing everything centrally), then the hardware required is mostly off-the-shelf. It goes from being a $25,000 grant proposal, to some undergrad's thesis/semester project.
Actually lots of people do book "scanning" with digital cameras. In fact, you can sometimes get much better results off of a book using a digital camera than you can by pressing it down against the bed of a flatbed scanner (because if the page wasn't typeset with a wide gutter, you'll start to distort some of the letters as you get close to the binding). Plus, it's a lot easier on the books, which is important when you're talking about books that are all going to be 75 years old and some much, much older.
The best way to use a flatbed scanner to scan books is actually to run them through a guillotine first, chop off the binding, and then scan the loose pages; this produces good results but it's not something most libraries are going to be willing to do.
Here's a commercial non-destructive book scanner which uses cameras. Basically, what you do, is you have two cameras, each pointing at one side of the book. You use lights held at an angle to the paper with reflectors and diffusers so that it's evenly lit, and then you just flip the pages and fire the cameras once per page turn. You can build a setup to do this (with manual page turning) for a few hundred bucks plus the cost of the cameras. The auto page-turning is really what drives up the cost.
People were photographing text using cameras for a lot longer than photocopiers have been around. The standard way of reproducing photographs was by using a copy stand and a fixed camera in order to make an internegative, and prior to the introduction of all-digital typesetting, almost all offset printing was done by photographing a paste-up of the final product with a special camera, which produced the plate used in the press.
So in short, although you're correct that just holding a digital camera over a book and clicking the shutter wouldn't give great results, the issues surrounding lighting, lens distortion, and focus are all solved problems. (And if you really wanted to be slick about things like barrel distortion and dust, you could start each run by photographing a standard grey field and a checkerboard, and use that to remove dust and correct for distortion digitally, rather than mechanically/optically.)
Someone has taken the time to compile the data into the database. It cost time and money to do so. Google chose to take the shortcut and use that db instead of making their own (which further hints that the work involved was not trivial at all - you really can't argue that Google made a mistake, that they didn't know what they were doing).
Doesn't matter; copyright -- at least U.S. and I think British copyright, I have no idea what if any philosophy underlies the Chinese system, if indeed they have one -- is blind to the time, money, and "sweat of the brow" that went into creating a work. The only thing that matters is the originality of the final work. Compilations of facts, although they may require a lot of energy to create, are not copywritable. The canonical case involves telephone directories, which require a lot of effort to assemble, and may be freely copied.
Unless someone can come up with a convincing argument for why this pinyin database is more "creative" than the compilation of a telephone directory or a book of mathematical tables, I don't really see why the copyright is an issue.
meh, the argument for why compilations of public domain "facts" should be considered a copyrightable work is that it is work to compile those facts. Why people can't understand that not all work results in property is beyond me, but there's ya reasoning.
I don't know about in China (does China even have a copyright system to begin with?), but in the U.S., the amount of "work" you put into something doesn't matter one whit in terms of it being copywritable. You could spend your entire life compiling statistics on something, and at the end of the project, the only thing that you could copyright would be things like the actual typesetting and any copy that you wrote in between the statistics themselves. It's the same thing with recipes: anyone can copy Julia Childs' french bread recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, what they can't copy is the text itself describing how to execute/implement that recipe.
But enormous amounts of effort are routinely put into things like mathematical and physics tables (and historically, they were a lot more important than they are now), and the data themselves aren't protected. You can't own the digits of pi, or the atomic weights of the elements, regardless of how much time you spend figuring them out. The problems associated with letting people "own" and claim copyright to bare facts or compilations of facts would would greatly outweigh the possible economic benefits of letting people derive additional economic gain from them.
If the Chinese allow companies to copyright bare collections of facts, they're a bunch of idiots.
And of course, as a side effect they'll probably wind up with a lovely distributed system for solving captcha.;)
True, but CAPTCHAs always seemed like a bit of an inelegant hack anyway. First, they're horrible from a disabled-access standpoint, and second they're really not all that effective against a concerted enemy when there's a lot of money on the line. Spammers can just pay a few kids in some Third World country to sit there all day and solve CAPTCHAs if they want to.
Since message boards, which are the major users of CAPTCHAs, are practically by design little fiefdoms, I don't think they're nearly as hard to patrol as a common-carrier network like email. The solution to message-board spam is to either institute a moderator-delay (for small blogs and boards), or simply make enough admins with IP-ban powers so that the second someone starts spamming, they get banned and the spam gets deleted. Lameness filters working on the same principles as email spam-filters are probably helpful, too.
I've been hoping that someone with deep pockets (Google, IBM, Sun) would take on this area for a while.
There is a major need for an OSS OCR package, and right now the field is pretty bare. There's GOCR, and a commercial offering called OCRShop, and at least that I've run across, that's about it. Nothing really on par with Omnipage, or other commercial packages for other platforms.
I think there are some really neat applications for OCR that have never really been investigated, because it's so expensive to build that capability into other products. A free OCR engine that really worked could lead to some very neat book-scanning applications, just for starters. I don't think that there's really any integrated packages around for helping people scan books and manuscripts. (Right now you have to photograph the pages, keep them organized, then OCR them and proofread the text against the images. Bit of a nightmare.) I'd love to see a free application for libraries that let a user batch scan (via a digital camera -- let's not get into what I think of SANE and scanners generally) a book, and then provided a nice interface for proofreading the OCRed text against the original image.
Something like that could have a huge social impact. There are a lot of libraries where I'm sure they'd love to scan some of their out-of-copyright assets and provide them to patrons in a digital form, but it's just too technically complicated. An easy-to-use program that let the proofreading be done by nontechnical users (maybe remotely, as long as we're dreaming) could vastly increase the volume of digital materials available.
You can integrate tightly with desktop emails. But most web based solution do pretty good virus scan and pretty good junk filtering.
No reason you can't do that on the server, and then insert headers that are recognized and processed by the desktop client. It's just a matter of standardizing the headers.
Many ISPs run all incoming email through a spam filter and rank it; it's pretty trivial to insert a rule (if you have a MUA that supports processing incoming mail according to rules) to put all the ISP-flagged messages into a Spam box, or raise its "spamminess" when analyzing it locally.
Similarly, a lot of antivirus stuff gets applied at the server level these days, and while personally I find it annoying that my mailserver would ever strip off a file for any reason, when it does, it's functionally equivalent to most webmail systems. AFAIK, most Webmail systems actually integrate with MTAs that do the virus and spam-scanning themselves; the "webmail" interfaces (at least last time I looked into them) pretty much just replicate a typical MUA. You just don't see a distinction so it seems more integrated.
I agree that's pretty neat (also, being able to open an attached spreadsheet in Google Docs and work on it without installing anything is pretty slick, too). However, there's no reason why you couldn't have that in a desktop/client-side email client.
There was a time, not that long ago, when automatic highlighting of URLs in plaintext email, and automatically routing those links to your web browser, was a pretty slick feature. Now, it's considered standard. I can't think of a major desktop email program that doesn't do it, and what's more, people assume that the feature exists when they're writing email. (When you send someone a URL you assume that they'll be able to click it, even though you're probably not writing an actual "HREF=" HTML link.) Okay, maybe Eudora doesn't do it. But wake me up when Eudora does Unicode and I'll take it seriously again.
I could definitely see automatic postal-address-to-webmap functionality in a future version of Apple Mail (they already do it in Apple's Address Book), plus in a desktop app you could also link that address to other stuff on your machine: cross reference it to your address book, but also to documents that contain that address and other items. (Yeah, you can do that online, too, but it's a question of where you have more data. For the immediate future it'll probably be on your desktop machine.)
There's nothing really special about an online application versus a desktop one in implementing features like that, it's just that online applications, being newer, have recently been much more aggressive about implementing new features because they're trying to grow their marketshare.
Slashdot Mirror
Why they do it is pretty simple.
Imagine we have two makers of some piece of technology, who are in stiff competition. Some other company waltzes in and offers both companies a fat wad of cash, if they're willing to compromise their products in some way. One company says "sure," and takes the cash. The other company doesn't.
The company who bends over takes a small portion of their kickback, and uses it to depress the price on their unit. Since they've already made a lot of money, before they even sell a single board, they can afford to price their model a bit lower than the competition's.
The public, which is made up mostly of idiots who don't look beyond the price tag, only notice that one company's is cheaper than the other, and flock to it.
End result: more compromised units end up being sold; that hardware design becomes standard; the company who tried to produce good hardware and sell it goes out of business.
No I think the point in the story was that the constant heat both from the sun striking the dark-colored road surface, and from the friction of the cars driving over it (the wheel/road contact surface is hardly frictionless, although it doesn't slip a whole lot), created heat, which warmed the air through the pipes.
The story has a bit of an urban legend quality to it, but the principles seem sound.
Details, details ... ;)
I was curious exactly what you'd have to do to get 1,000 Gs, so here are some back-of-the-envelope numbers for comparison:
r ation/ referencing medical literature from helmeted motorcycle crashesc ess_of_Wales
It wouldn't survive being fired out of a handgun (zero to 800fps along a 5" barrel [1] implies an acceleration, assuming I did my math right, of ~468000 m/s^2 or about ~47,000 Gs).
Still, it's better than your brain inside your head, which can only take about 150-200 Gs before you start doing serious/irreparable damage [2] (the rest of your body is a lot lower, like 8-20 Gs depending on direction and body part, but your head alone can take a bit more since it doesn't have all those squishy bits).
I was curious how fast you'd need to be going in a typical car accident to get 1,000Gs: The fatal accident that killed Princess Di was supposedly somewhere around 70-100 G [3]; if we assume that was the result of crashing at 120 MPH or so, 190 km/h [4], we can extrapolate that to get 1,000G, you'd need to have a speed of around 1682 MPH. [5] (That doesn't say anything really about surviving a car crash at that speed, because obviously there are mechanical and thermal problems involved...)
So if you swallowed one of those things, I think it's pretty clear that you'd be mush long before it got bothered.
[1] Pulling these numbers out of my ass, but they're roughly typical for a 1911.
[2] http://hypertextbook.com/physics/mechanics/accele
[3] ibid.
[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Diana,_Prin
[5] You use the acceleration value and speed to calculate a "time" for the collision, around 0.07s, and then use that to get the velocity for an acceleration of 1000G. I never said it was that reliable a figure...
Yeah, right. And then monkeys flew out of his butt.
It would explain the color choice, though.
That's one way of doing it. However, I suspect that the cheapest way is probably to just keep the oil constrained to the racks, and use chilled water throughout the building. There's a lot of existing experience and infrastructure related to chilled water.
Depending on the temperature you need to get it down to, it might be acceptable to just use passive cooling (cooling/evaporative towers, radiators) and not actual refrigerative (state-change, with compressors and the rest) systems. Certainly if you built your datacenter in a northern climate, you'd probably be fine most of the year by just pumping the water/coolant through some radiators on the roof and back down.
And you could do the same thermosiphoning stuff with water as you can with oil, but with a lot less oil. Sure, you have an extra heat-exchange step, but you don't have to worry about using oil-proof fittings throughout the building -- regular plumbing would suffice.
The only problem i can see is that once you bath your pc components in oil you cannot reuse them elsewhere because the contacts get all dirty.
... just dry it off, and it's clean. Really great for taking cutting oil off of parts after machining.
Well, yeah, but that's what methyl ethyl ketone is for!
Slightly offtopic: I had always assumed that MEK was increasingly hard to get because they had discovered it caused cancer or something, but Wikipedia indicates that it's actually a drug precursor? Bizarre. Anyway, you used to be able to get the stuff in most hardware stores, and it's just about the best degreaser that you'll ever use. You can put a greasy part in MEK, swish it around a little, and pull it out
Not sure when exactly it happened, but all of a sudden it became really hard to just go out and buy anymore. Seems to me it was about 10 years ago. But if Wikipedia is to be believed, it still gets used as a solvent in a lot of paints and stuff.
It's not a step forward. It's a step back in a sense. This has been how large transformers have been build for decades. I'm sure that this application will use the same oil as street transformers, and I've seen a number of hobby applications of this in machine cooling before.
s -shrivel, processed from baby seals, 3M product called "Fluorinert."
More than that, back in the day, it wasn't uncommon for supercomputers (I think several of the Cray models specifically) to have their processor cores submerged in liquid coolant. [1]
It wasn't oil, though. IIRC, it was a hideously expensive, probably ozone-depleting, known-to-the-state-of-California-to-make-your-nut
For a few years back in the IBM G5 / Intel P4 days, I was sure we were headed back in that direction. I mean, my computer has a freaking radiator in it, a submersion bath can't be that far away, right? But then the chip manufacturers woke up to the whole power-consumption thing and we got a reprieve.
I don't know what the boiling point of Fluorinert is, but I've always thought that the best cooling liquid would be some sort of lightly-pressurized gas, such that it was a liquid except for right over the surface of the chips, where it would boil. The state-change would pull away tons of heat, and then you could re-condense it against the top of the container (chill it either just to the atmosphere or with conventional refrigeration systems). Don't think I've ever seen this implemented, though.
[1] Wikipedia confirms and says it was the Cray II specifically. Photo here; the Fluorinert was cooled via a "waterfall," which is damn cool in itself.
You say that like it matters. If the music industry could get some sort of strict liability pushed into law, the courts would just treat that unsecured wireless router like they treat a loaded handgun left sitting around. They'd just say that your failure to secure it was so grossly negligent that you're automatically responsible for any misuse that occurred as a result.
Sure, it would mean fining a lot lot of grandmothers (and children, and dead people, and children of dead people, etc.) into bankruptcy, but do you really think that's not acceptable to the RIAA, if they feel that their cash cow is in jeopardy?
I don't think the RIAA is ever going to go quietly. It's not just going to wink out of existence some day. It, by which I mean the people who make it up, have too much invested already to not go down without a fight. Which means they're going to call in every favor from every two-bit politician and lobbyist that they have, and get things passed (tack on to this must-pass bill here, another voice-vote there...what the people don't know, they can't blame anyone for later, right?) without any regard for the consequences.
And last I checked, nobody, not even Congress has any love for the RIAA. They get complaints by the hundreds or thousands I bet - each and every single Congress Member - about the RIAA.
r tact0201.htm
All of which are helpfully read by some unpaid staffer and promptly placed in the "circular file."
Meanwhile, those members of Congress do seem to be listening to the entertainment companies that sign the donation checks -- or did you forget about all the Senators and Representatives who signed on to the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act?
When push comes to shove, unless it's immediately preceding an election and it's an issue that's being widely covered by the media, cash talks and bullshit -- which includes pretty much anything not written on check paper -- walks. Politicians only care about two things: how they'll get re-elected, and how they'll get paid. And it's going to take a lot more publicity than we have right now to turn digital media into an issue that drives votes, like abortion, gun control, or taxes.
Want some names? Dianne Feinstein, for starters, is practically the film and recording industry's representative to the Senate. [1] She's personally cosponsored more pro-industry, anti-consumer legislation than anyone else that I can think of, and she gets re-elected, year after year. Orrin Hatch is another one, on the other side of the aisle. Ditto for Ted Stevens -- the man's a borderline retard, but he brings home the bacon to Alaska, and that's all voters there care about.
Until you can get enough interest to knock some of the politicians who are obviously in the pocket of the industry out of office, nothing's really changed. They'll appear to clean up their act for a while when they know their offices are on the line (in theory), but once back off the hook they'll just go back to screwing the public like they always do.
[1] Here's one sample that looks like it was probably drafted by the RIAA itself; the "ART" Act from 2005: http://feinstein.senate.gov/05releases/r-piracy-a
You're missing the point.
The benefit of all these cracks isn't to allow people to copy the movies. That ability was never in doubt -- people will always be able to do that. They'll be able to do that regardless of what the content monopolies do, short of just deciding that they won't release movies anymore (which is fine; there's enough of a demand for entertainment that other people will do it -- there's nothing special about making movies that a lot of people can't do, it just takes a lot of money).
Holding onto a crack until AACS is ubiquitous wouldn't do anything. The ultimate failure of AACS isn't, and never was, in doubt -- all DRM is flawed, and it will eventually be broken.
The question is whether it's possible to convince both the studios/content-creators, and consumers, of the utter futility of DRM in the first place, so they'll stop trying to do it, and stop wasting everyone's time. DRM is nothing but a broken window: it's millions of man-hours and probably billions of dollars of resources diverted from other, more productive, tasks, both to create it and break it. That's the real cost of DRM.
So if by releasing cracks for AACS every time they update it, as quickly as possible, it demonstrates to the studios that they're engaging in a war against a guerrilla enemy that they can't possibly defeat, regardless of how much money they spend, perhaps they'll throw in the towel sooner rather than later. It may be a slim chance, but given that Apple has started to see the light, there's some hope.
That's the real benefit of these cracks. Compared to the economic and social cost of the wasted effort, the ability of people to pirate a few movies pales in comparison.
Long answer: Although the Supreme Court has at times broadened the definition of an individual ("man") as used in the Constitution to include foreigners, traditionally the rights of foreign citizens while in the U.S. (or the rights of U.S. citizens abroad) is defined by relationships agreed to between the nations themselves, via treaties. Most nations agree to essentially afford the same rights to foreign visitors as they do to their own citizens, in exchange for the same protection for theirs. This sort of quid pro quo, written or unwritten, dates back hundreds if not thousands of years.
a sp ); basically they originated as requests from one sovereign to another, asking that the bearer be given safe conduct through their territory. In fact English ones were actually signed by the King or Queen, up until the mid 1600s.
If you read the text inside the front cover of a U.S. Passport [1], that's what it's all about; a Passport is essentially a request to a foreign nation, to extend -- voluntarily -- certain rights and privileges to the bearer (who, the Passport signifies, is a citizen in basically good standing of the U.S.). I'm not sure if they do it anymore, but it used to be pretty standard to confiscate the Passport of a felon. [2]
The idea that the same Constitutional rights held by U.S. citizens apply to everyone, worldwide, including non-citizens, is a fairly modern construction. (And to be honest I'm not really sure if it holds water, since the Constitution is basically an agreement between the government and the governed, and I think it's dangerous to apply it to other nations' citizens; but that's a whole different issue.)
In times past, traveling without a Passport or similar diplomatic papers, or traveling to a country that didn't have a treaty with your own, was a dangerous business. (And in fact it still is; wander around in the wrong part of the world without a Passport and you'll find yourself detained at the very least.)
[1] "The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection."
[2] Neat page on the origins of modern Passports here ( http://www.passport.gov.uk/general_history_early.
Are you sure it was Barbados? I thought it was Antigua. It wouldn't surprise me if there was more than one country going after the online gambling thing, though...
Well, the major difference is that in the U.S., and in many other countries, the "mafia" have achieved enough power to effectively legitimatize their business models, and in some cases even protect them from competition, with the weight of law.
Why work against the government, when for a few million bucks, you can make it work for you?
And it would be difficult and expensive enough that the manufacturers would still subject their products to thorough testing. And probably expensive enough that it'll only be used in high-confidence operations, such as NASA hardware.
That was my thought, too. I could definitely see this being used in satellites or other applications where getting the hardware back is impossible or very expensive, but I can't see it being used on a microwave or DVD player.
It's my understanding that a lot of NASA's stuff has long been designed with a high degree of flexibility in the hardware, so that as much stuff as possible can be patched and fixed in software. (A while back there was a story about Voyager and how the NASA guys had done some software patching to make it last longer by reducing power consumption.) Actually, I'd be very surprised if some NASA engineer somewhere hasn't considered using FPGAs already, in order to get the additional flexibility and fault-tolerance that being able to re-jigger your hardware from millions of miles away would bring.
I had never heard of Digital Proofreaders before; that's very cool. Their system seems to be very close to what I was envisioning (allows distributed proofreading via a web interface, automatically assembles books together and puts them in a central repository for access).
Thanks for the link. The next time I'm talking to any of my librarian friends, I'll have to mention it. I didn't see anything on their FAQ though about accepting books from libraries for digitization, just on starting a project yourself (meaning scan the book and submit the scans and OCRed files for proofreading). But the scanning is really the easy part relative to the proofreading, so it still is a big step forward.
While I agree that students should have rights, I have to ask: why shouldn't they be second-class citizens? They're not working and they're not nearly as capable as adults of making good decisions. I think "second-class citizen" is a rather good description of what they should be, as opposed to the "first-class citizens" who work and pay taxes for the upkeep of the city. The question, though, is about how many or how few rights second-class citizens should have.
I think the problem is that the U.S. legal system lacks the framework for dealing with anything besides two types of things: individuals, and property. Either you're an individual, and have rights, or you're property, and belong to somebody else.
There have always been questions as to the status of certain things: slaves, for example, were traditionally property, but later became individuals; animals, who arguably have certain independent characteristics, are still just property; and the current abortion debate is mostly an argument as to whether a fetus is an individual, or merely a woman's property.
The track record of the legal system at dealing with the grey areas isn't too great (cf. "3/5ths compromise," or the now-ridiculous limits on exactly how hard you can beat your wife). The solution here seems to be to clarify the status of minors as one or the other.
Yeah that's similar to what I was thinking about. Actually, what I was recalling was this thing, which seems to pretty clearly use off-the-shelf DSLR cameras (not sure on the lenses though, they're not visible). It probably costs a fortune because of the robotics and vacuum system necessary for the automatic page turning, but I think you could DIY something similar out of two copy stands for a lot less if you were okay with flipping pages.
The one you linked to seems like it would have more distortion of the pages because the cameras aren't being held constantly perpendicular to the page, but maybe it just corrects for that in software afterwards. (It wouldn't be hard, in fact I think all the code you'd need to do it is part of the Panorama Tools / Hugin package.)
What I think is a bigger problem for most libraries isn't the scanning per se, because that at least is a problem that most non-technical people can understand, but it's the storage and document-management that's the issue. Once you have the book scanned, you have a giant pile of JPEGs or TIFF files...unless you're careful about organization, it could become a real mess in a hurry.
So where I think the missing piece is, has to do with getting from raw images to an actual ebook. The hardest problem seems to be in the proofreading step; if you run each image through an OCR program, and then you want to proofread it, you need some way of distributing pages out to proofreaders, and letting each of them have a page of text and the image from that page, side by side. And then managing their edits and checking changes back in, etc. It's nothing really novel -- they're all solved problems in other areas (documents management, change management, remote access, web services) -- but I've never seen them combined.
If you had a software package that handled all the document management and proofreading (preferably something that your proofreaders could log into remotely and work, while storing everything centrally), then the hardware required is mostly off-the-shelf. It goes from being a $25,000 grant proposal, to some undergrad's thesis/semester project.
Actually lots of people do book "scanning" with digital cameras. In fact, you can sometimes get much better results off of a book using a digital camera than you can by pressing it down against the bed of a flatbed scanner (because if the page wasn't typeset with a wide gutter, you'll start to distort some of the letters as you get close to the binding). Plus, it's a lot easier on the books, which is important when you're talking about books that are all going to be 75 years old and some much, much older.
The best way to use a flatbed scanner to scan books is actually to run them through a guillotine first, chop off the binding, and then scan the loose pages; this produces good results but it's not something most libraries are going to be willing to do.
Here's a commercial non-destructive book scanner which uses cameras. Basically, what you do, is you have two cameras, each pointing at one side of the book. You use lights held at an angle to the paper with reflectors and diffusers so that it's evenly lit, and then you just flip the pages and fire the cameras once per page turn. You can build a setup to do this (with manual page turning) for a few hundred bucks plus the cost of the cameras. The auto page-turning is really what drives up the cost.
People were photographing text using cameras for a lot longer than photocopiers have been around. The standard way of reproducing photographs was by using a copy stand and a fixed camera in order to make an internegative, and prior to the introduction of all-digital typesetting, almost all offset printing was done by photographing a paste-up of the final product with a special camera, which produced the plate used in the press.
So in short, although you're correct that just holding a digital camera over a book and clicking the shutter wouldn't give great results, the issues surrounding lighting, lens distortion, and focus are all solved problems. (And if you really wanted to be slick about things like barrel distortion and dust, you could start each run by photographing a standard grey field and a checkerboard, and use that to remove dust and correct for distortion digitally, rather than mechanically/optically.)
Someone has taken the time to compile the data into the database. It cost time and money to do so. Google chose to take the shortcut and use that db instead of making their own (which further hints that the work involved was not trivial at all - you really can't argue that Google made a mistake, that they didn't know what they were doing).
Doesn't matter; copyright -- at least U.S. and I think British copyright, I have no idea what if any philosophy underlies the Chinese system, if indeed they have one -- is blind to the time, money, and "sweat of the brow" that went into creating a work. The only thing that matters is the originality of the final work. Compilations of facts, although they may require a lot of energy to create, are not copywritable. The canonical case involves telephone directories, which require a lot of effort to assemble, and may be freely copied.
Unless someone can come up with a convincing argument for why this pinyin database is more "creative" than the compilation of a telephone directory or a book of mathematical tables, I don't really see why the copyright is an issue.
meh, the argument for why compilations of public domain "facts" should be considered a copyrightable work is that it is work to compile those facts. Why people can't understand that not all work results in property is beyond me, but there's ya reasoning.
I don't know about in China (does China even have a copyright system to begin with?), but in the U.S., the amount of "work" you put into something doesn't matter one whit in terms of it being copywritable. You could spend your entire life compiling statistics on something, and at the end of the project, the only thing that you could copyright would be things like the actual typesetting and any copy that you wrote in between the statistics themselves. It's the same thing with recipes: anyone can copy Julia Childs' french bread recipe from Mastering the Art of French Cooking, what they can't copy is the text itself describing how to execute/implement that recipe.
But enormous amounts of effort are routinely put into things like mathematical and physics tables (and historically, they were a lot more important than they are now), and the data themselves aren't protected. You can't own the digits of pi, or the atomic weights of the elements, regardless of how much time you spend figuring them out. The problems associated with letting people "own" and claim copyright to bare facts or compilations of facts would would greatly outweigh the possible economic benefits of letting people derive additional economic gain from them.
If the Chinese allow companies to copyright bare collections of facts, they're a bunch of idiots.
And of course, as a side effect they'll probably wind up with a lovely distributed system for solving captcha. ;)
True, but CAPTCHAs always seemed like a bit of an inelegant hack anyway. First, they're horrible from a disabled-access standpoint, and second they're really not all that effective against a concerted enemy when there's a lot of money on the line. Spammers can just pay a few kids in some Third World country to sit there all day and solve CAPTCHAs if they want to.
Since message boards, which are the major users of CAPTCHAs, are practically by design little fiefdoms, I don't think they're nearly as hard to patrol as a common-carrier network like email. The solution to message-board spam is to either institute a moderator-delay (for small blogs and boards), or simply make enough admins with IP-ban powers so that the second someone starts spamming, they get banned and the spam gets deleted. Lameness filters working on the same principles as email spam-filters are probably helpful, too.
I've been hoping that someone with deep pockets (Google, IBM, Sun) would take on this area for a while.
There is a major need for an OSS OCR package, and right now the field is pretty bare. There's GOCR, and a commercial offering called OCRShop, and at least that I've run across, that's about it. Nothing really on par with Omnipage, or other commercial packages for other platforms.
I think there are some really neat applications for OCR that have never really been investigated, because it's so expensive to build that capability into other products. A free OCR engine that really worked could lead to some very neat book-scanning applications, just for starters. I don't think that there's really any integrated packages around for helping people scan books and manuscripts. (Right now you have to photograph the pages, keep them organized, then OCR them and proofread the text against the images. Bit of a nightmare.) I'd love to see a free application for libraries that let a user batch scan (via a digital camera -- let's not get into what I think of SANE and scanners generally) a book, and then provided a nice interface for proofreading the OCRed text against the original image.
Something like that could have a huge social impact. There are a lot of libraries where I'm sure they'd love to scan some of their out-of-copyright assets and provide them to patrons in a digital form, but it's just too technically complicated. An easy-to-use program that let the proofreading be done by nontechnical users (maybe remotely, as long as we're dreaming) could vastly increase the volume of digital materials available.
You can integrate tightly with desktop emails. But most web based solution do pretty good virus scan and pretty good junk filtering.
No reason you can't do that on the server, and then insert headers that are recognized and processed by the desktop client. It's just a matter of standardizing the headers.
Many ISPs run all incoming email through a spam filter and rank it; it's pretty trivial to insert a rule (if you have a MUA that supports processing incoming mail according to rules) to put all the ISP-flagged messages into a Spam box, or raise its "spamminess" when analyzing it locally.
Similarly, a lot of antivirus stuff gets applied at the server level these days, and while personally I find it annoying that my mailserver would ever strip off a file for any reason, when it does, it's functionally equivalent to most webmail systems. AFAIK, most Webmail systems actually integrate with MTAs that do the virus and spam-scanning themselves; the "webmail" interfaces (at least last time I looked into them) pretty much just replicate a typical MUA. You just don't see a distinction so it seems more integrated.
I agree that's pretty neat (also, being able to open an attached spreadsheet in Google Docs and work on it without installing anything is pretty slick, too). However, there's no reason why you couldn't have that in a desktop/client-side email client.
There was a time, not that long ago, when automatic highlighting of URLs in plaintext email, and automatically routing those links to your web browser, was a pretty slick feature. Now, it's considered standard. I can't think of a major desktop email program that doesn't do it, and what's more, people assume that the feature exists when they're writing email. (When you send someone a URL you assume that they'll be able to click it, even though you're probably not writing an actual "HREF=" HTML link.) Okay, maybe Eudora doesn't do it. But wake me up when Eudora does Unicode and I'll take it seriously again.
I could definitely see automatic postal-address-to-webmap functionality in a future version of Apple Mail (they already do it in Apple's Address Book), plus in a desktop app you could also link that address to other stuff on your machine: cross reference it to your address book, but also to documents that contain that address and other items. (Yeah, you can do that online, too, but it's a question of where you have more data. For the immediate future it'll probably be on your desktop machine.)
There's nothing really special about an online application versus a desktop one in implementing features like that, it's just that online applications, being newer, have recently been much more aggressive about implementing new features because they're trying to grow their marketshare.